V. Errant Diffusions

Over the centuries, Morgain Le Fay has been outfitted with various characteristics; her personality has been multiplied and changed, and she appears in different tales of different geographies.¹ Just to give some examples:

Geoffrey of Monmouth:

The one who is first among them has greater skill in healing, as her beauty surpasses that of her sisters. Her name is Morgen, and she has learned the uses of all plants in curing the ills of the body. She knows, too, the art of changing her shape, of flying through the air, like Daedalus, on strange wings. At will, she is now at Brest, now at Chartres, now at Pavia; and at will she glides down from the sky on to your shores. ‘They say she had taught astrology to her sisters […]’.²

Lucy Allen Paton, on one of the sources she analyzes:

Morgain here is purely an other-world fay, gifted with a primitive magic power, amorous, supreme, brooking no rival.³

Roger Sherman Loomis, on one of the sources he analyzes:

Here the traditional elements are: Morgain as one of a trio of fays; Morgain as mistress, as well as fostermother, of the hero […].⁴

Extract from an encyclopedic work from 1874, under the entry for Fata Morgana:

An ancient hermit is said to have lived on the Aetna who, through long continued observation, had learned to deduce future phenomena and as a result gave prophecies; the fairy Morgana had entrusted herself to him, and it was her castles, palaces, gardens and ships, her festivals, magic spells and pictorial proclamations of the future that were seen rising above the sea by those who consulted the hermit about his oracle.⁵

Morgain Le Fay, especially in the context of her reference to the optical phenomenon of the Fata Morgana, stands for deception and re-signification, incomprehensibility and concealment – and thus reveals a specific poetics: it cannot be fixed as a narrative of origin, but is at the same time part of various cultural narratives, geographies, and identities. If Le Guin offers a starting point to think differently about the form of a story or tale, its narrative structure, another question might concern the diffusion of those stories and tales. How was it possible that the story of Morgain Le Fay not only spread across Europe but also merged with local tales? While Le Guin distinguishes this different form from heroic tales told in arrow-like fashion, here it would be a matter of distinguishing this diffusion from the commitment to one version and one geographical inscription of a story. Or, to put it more generally, let me quote one of the questions from the Intro: How can community-building narratives be presented in a manner that keeps them “alive”?

Morgain Le Fay is part of the legends about King Arthur, which are summarized under the term Matière de Bretagne (Matter of Britain). If we can believe Walker, her story has also been influenced by a variety of cultures, rituals, and myths from very diverse geographies (like the use of cauldrons for sacrificial rituals during the bronze era of today’s China). Looking at Europe, historians who study medieval tales and the Matière de Bretagne ask how it was possible for parts and variations of the myth to appear not only in Breton folklore, but apparently at the same time also in Southern Europe. Is it possible to extract some aspects from that journey to think of a different way of diffusion of tales against territorial bigotry? What conditions enabled the story to be one that is widely considered trans-European?

A common assumption isthat the Arthurian myths reached Southern Europe via singing and wandering poets from Northern Europe, until the material of the Arthurian legend and thus also Morgain Le Fay became “part of the repertoire of Italian folk poetry.”⁶ A certain linearity is suggested within this imaginary: the tale wandering from the North to the South. Firstly: This is not to say that other tales might not have traveled the other way around. Secondly: A number of questions arise that are seemingly not so easy to answer, as the path appears to be more blurred than expected on closer inspection. One example of the spread of the legend are reliefs with motifs from the Arthurian legend on Modena Cathedral in today’s Italy. The reliefs were probably created in the 1120s or 1130s,⁷ and parts from the Arthurian legend must therefore have been known around Modena at that time, if not earlier. They must have also had a certain relevance in the Modena area to have featured as part of a church building. Another example to which has already been alluded is the translation of the name Morgain Le Fay into Italian and its connection with Mount Etna. Paton writes: “The tradition of Morgain that is recorded in the thirteenth-century romance, Floriant et Florete, domiciles her in Sicily on Mongibello.”⁸ The footnote states that Morgan is referred to here as la fée de Montgibel. Montgibel or Mongibello is another name for Mount Etna. Both examples prove both the spread of the material in Southern Europe in the early 12th and 13th centuries and its connection with the respective local culture. Furthermore, the story seems to have existed not only as a foreign narrative external to the local culture, but was also woven into local buildings and geographies. Philologist Rita Lejeune writes “that Arthur was known in Poitou when Geoffrey of Monmouth was finishing his opus at Oxford, and that by 1170, the date of Chretien’s Erec, the Matter of Britain had conquered Catalonia,”⁹ and thus confirms an early and wide diffusion. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chretien authored some of the oldest written evidence of Arthurian legend and thus form a point of reference within the history of its diffusion. Lejeune’s observations suggest that it is difficult to trace the spread of the story linearly in retrospect; one could say that it spread chaotically. It cannot be ruled out that there are older manuscripts that have simply not been handed down. Beyond that, however, the influence of wandering poets seems to have played a major role in the spread of the stories. To understand the transculturality and transgeography inherent to the tales around Fata Morgana / Morgain Le Fay, it might be interesting to look more closely at these wandering poets and the conditions for the diffusion of stories around 1100.

Before the 12th century, Latin “was the only cross-border medium for oral and written communication (lingua franca) in the European Middle Ages.”¹⁰ That changed, when, starting around 1100, a new court culture developed, including specific dress styles and hunting rituals, but also a particular court literature. Court literature was not necessarily written in Latin; it “was mainly created and written in the vernacular.”¹¹ As members of the courts visited each other, a trans-European court culture evolved. Markus Greulich, one of the authors around the research project and online exhibition The Art of Reading in the Middle Ages, writes: “Courtly songs and romances quickly became part of the trans-European court culture of the 12th and 13th centuries. They were then always written in the language of the poets and their recipients.” And he adds: “Whenever they were adopted in other languages, their content was always changed and adapted to the new cultural context.”¹² This suggests a very free approach to translations that seems absurd today. Translating a story was not necessarily a question of translating word for word, but of adapting it for the respective audience and making appropriate changes to the content. Translations and interpretations were not only made at the level of vocabulary and terms, but also to the story in general. Part of many poets’ repertoires, and thus part of the traveling texts’ “transformations and translations” (remember Le Guin), was that of the Matière de Bretagne, which, consequently, should not be described as a singular hero’s journey but should also be considered in light of the time it spent in the carrier bags of the traveling poets.

The traveling poets had different names, depending on the region and occupation: jongleurs, troubadours / trobairitz, minstrels, conteurs. Whether their carrier bags contained manuscripts, i.e. written material, or whether the stories traveled orally is open to debate. The aforementioned Loomis was convinced that the “professional entertainers”¹³ who traveled through Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries spread the legends of Arthur and others in songs and performances. Loomis seems very focused on explicitly Breton storytellers who orally transmitted the knowledge of these myths to Italy and thus to Italian poetry.¹⁴ Others, like the medievalist Patrick Sims-Williams, disagree and suggest that Loomis' view is overly simplistic. The succession of a period of oral tradition cannot be clearly separated from a period of written tradition. Sims-Williams considers it just as likely that existing written interpretations of well-known authors in various dialects were orally amplified, refashioned and embellished.¹⁵ In this case, too, we would be dealing with an open and playful approach to the existing material.

The wandering poets were entertainers. They were not interested in reproducing or reciting a text with scholarly precision; their aim was to entertain their audience. Professor of English Hannah Johnson points out that although the private reading of books was already a widespread practice in the Middle Ages, there was also a widespread practice of public reading and performances of literary material. She emphasizes: “Public reading encouraged the exchange of ideas between readers engaging in the same material at the same time. It also allowed for a larger readership and therefore a more vast dissemination of information and ideas because public reading is not dependent on the literacy of everyone listening.^”16 From the perspective of the entertainers – who performed for both common people and nobles – it also seems logical to embellish the stories collected on the journey with local characteristics (stories, names, geographical references) and adapt them accordingly to make them accessible to the audience. On the other hand, this also requires an audience or community that is willing to experience the stories they are familiar with in a new form, influenced and changed by the respective cultural context of the material used by the poet. Just as the stories change through the poet's journey, the stories on site also change through the encounter. Those who receive the traveling poets must also be prepared to allow themselves and their own stories to be transformed. This point is also relevant with regard to territorial bigotry, as it presupposes that one neither stubbornly insists on a monolithic view of space exclusively as territory nor on a static community-building narrative. For this would disregard the fact that these narratives have spread as wandering “transformations and translations.” It could also be described as the art of allowing one's own story to grow with parts of the other's story. This interaction between storyteller and audience, or rather, their mutual willingness to understand community-effective narratives as ever-changing, allows for an expanded consideration of the idea quoted in the Intro: if the story is “the product of a community” it would be “ever-changing, insofar as it is told by a storyteller whose manner of presenting tales is oral and alive.” With the previous considerations in mind, I would suggest two adjustments: The stories are the joint product of authors, storytellers and audience. The idea that the community alone produces the story seems a romantic but somewhat truncated notion. Allowing the community-building narratives to be supplemented by travelers, who are basically strangers, also weakens any idea of a community that is closed to the outside world and anchored in itself alone. Secondly, it seems true that the oral presentation kept the stories alive in a special way. However, it cannot be ruled out that oral dissemination also interacted with written dissemination. But the written manuscripts were also subject to constant change through free translations based on local accents (as in dialect but also emphasis).

This combination of attitudes and desires might have been what kept the myths in motion and contributed to the shifts in meaning, again and again weaving in local stories. So that King Arthur at some point lies inside the Etna volcano, Sicily becomes Avalon, and Morgain Le Fay shimmers as Fata Morgana over the Strait of Messina. “[T]he perfect tale emerges,” says Walter Benjamin, “from the layering of multiple retellings.”¹⁷ If these layers are put in a cauldron or carrier bag, carried by wandering storytellers, they might even have the space to mingle and intertwine, to be performed briefly, but as parts of long, transcultural and transgeographic journeys.

IV. Of Cauldrons and Carrier Bags

VI. Outro